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Shooting of lawyer in 2014 linked to embezzlement trial

A 34-year-old man being held on suspicion of shooting and injuring a lawyer outside his home in Pendeli, northern Athens, in 2014 has told authorities he was offered money to murder the legal counsel by a key suspect in an embezzlement trial.

Giorgos Antonopoulos, 62, was the lawyer for the Hellenic Electricity Market Operator (LAGIE), one of the plaintiffs in the trial of energy company executives accused of stealing money from the state. The managers at Hellas Power and Energa were accused of failing to hand over to the state some 250 million euros they had collected in property tax when it was levied via electricity bills.

The 34-year-old suspect, an Albanian national, told police recently that he met a well-dressed man in northern Athens who offered him 100,000 euros to kill Antonopoulos, who was shot in the head but escaped death. The lawyer had been carrying a large amount of cash on him and initially police thought that he was shot during a robbery.

However, the gunman has now told them that he was hired as a contract killer and picked out one of the suspects in the embezzlement trial from a series of photographs as the man who hired him.